Kneeling Before Corn: Recuperating More-than-Human Intimacies on the Salvadoran Milpa

The cultivation of the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) on subsistence farms in El Salvador is a multispecies, world-making, and ongoing process known as milpa. Kneeling Before Corn explores the intimate relations between plants and humans in the milpas of the northern rural region of El Salvador, rethinking, experimenting with, and developing new ways of documenting, analyzing, and knowing these intimacies.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2024
Publisher: University of Arizona Press

The cultivation of the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) on subsistence farms in El Salvador is a multispecies, world-making, and ongoing process. Milpa, a small subsistence corn farm, is derived from the Nahuatl word milli (‘field, or a piece of land under active cultivation). The milpa is a farming practice that uses perennial, intercropping, and swidden (fire and fallow) techniques that predate the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Kneeling Before Corn focuses on the intimate relations that develop between plants and humans in the milpas of the northern rural region of El Salvador. It explores the ways in which more-than-human intimacies travel away from and return to the milpa through human networks.

The co-authors of this work invite readers to consider more-than-human intimacies by rethinking, experimenting with, and developing new ways of documenting, analyzing, and knowing the intimacies that form between humans and the plants that they cultivate, conserve, long for, and eat. This book offers an innovative account of rural El Salvador in the twenty-first century.

The cultivation of the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) on subsistence farms in El Salvador is a multispecies, world-making, and ongoing process. Milpa, a small subsistence corn farm, is derived from the Nahuatl word milli (‘field, or a piece of land under active cultivation). The milpa is a farming practice that uses perennial, intercropping, and swidden (fire and fallow) techniques that predate the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Kneeling Before Corn focuses on the intimate relations that develop between plants and humans in the milpas of the northern rural region of El Salvador. It explores the ways in which more-than-human intimacies travel away from and return to the milpa through human networks.

The co-authors of this work invite readers to consider more-than-human intimacies by rethinking, experimenting with, and developing new ways of documenting, analyzing, and knowing the intimacies that form between humans and the plants that they cultivate, conserve, long for, and eat. This book offers an innovative account of rural El Salvador in the twenty-first century.

Weight: 340g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780816553372